>I no longer believe in poetry translation - imitation, yes
>(Nachdichtung), crib, yes, but not traduttore= traditore.
As a rule, one doesn't translate place names, although on occasion,
and only on occasion, something germaine is lost. Here's one: a
reading of Rochester's "An Evening's Ramble in St. James' Park" gains
little from knowledge of the park as it is today--it takes a slew of
education or footnotes to be aware of what it meant to Rochester (who
wrote that the past is another country?). Translate it into Spanish
as El parque de Santiago and you 've elucidated nothing and you've
added a bunch opf extraneous matter, as Santiago, the patron saint of
Spain, aka Matamoros, is never far from Spanish consciousness.
Imitation's the easy way out--it skips all the complications of
understanding the source culture from the outside or one's own from
the inside. And cribs are for schoolchildren. One hopes to convey to
the reader in the target language what makes the poem compelling in
the original and something of the context within which it was
written. But as with any reading of anything, the translation is an
interpretation--however I read, say, Asphodel entails a selection of
the available possibilities. So maybe one shouldn't believe in reading.
Me, I'm doing carpentry today, and trying for very exact
measurements, so that the pieces will fit together easily. But it's
almost impossible to make a perfect cut. I suppose I could say I no
longer believe in measurement. But it would be nice to have a bed to sleep on.
I guess I'm saying that belief is beside the point. We have a choice
of partial or total incomnprehension. I'll choose the former.
Why, by the way, do you think that cribs and imitations aren't betrayals?
Mark
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